itch.io

That rings a bell... Have you tried with/without retrace sync? I've run into a few drivers/environments where frames are not synchronized under certain circumstances, which results in a buildup of enormous numbers of queued frames between the application and the driver. Naturally, that will completely foil any attempts at managing timing.

Anyway, yes, as it is, the game's 50 stages will repeat, with increasing difficulty, just like XKobo/Kobo Deluxe. Everything will be maxed out (constant bullet hell) somewhere around stage 400 (IIRC), but the 50 stages will keep repeating indefinitely.

However, in Redux, I've replaced the lives with a shield, and a time rewind/replay system, so while you only have one life, if your ship is destroyed, time is rewound, and the events leading to the time of destruction are replayed exactly as they happened. By pressing fire at any point during this replay, you can take over the controls, and resume the game from that point.

So, basically, I've made the game completely unforgiving in that the only way forward is to actually handle the situations your run into - but instead, you can rewind and try different strategies as many times as you need. My thinking behind the rewind/replay system is that it gives the player a fair chance at actually learning how to handle difficult situations, rather than just brute-forcing through them at the cost of previously gained ships, or even "restarting" the game with a full set of ships on the current level.